Climate Change Adaptation,
Climate Services for Engineering,
and Data-driven Analyses
Given the increasing risks from climate change such as more intense or frequent heat waves, flooding, hurricanes, and wildfires, one major challenge for future generations of engineers is to ensure that infrastructure that is safe, durable, and reliable over design life. This emerging engineer responsibility relative to traditional engineering design procedures requires the ability to incorporate the current tools and results from climate science (such as climate modeling) and to adopt data analytic techniques (such as time series analyses).
I am a civil engineering researcher at Tetra Tech. I also serve as a member of American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) technical committee on Future Weather and Climate Extremes (part of the Committee on Adaptation to a Changing Climate).
I have worked on research projects that aimed to help improve engineering adaptation to climate change by providing location-specific historical climate change assessments and future forecasts and projections, bridging engineering applications with use of climate model results, and employing statistical analyses to assess future climate change uncertainty.
I believe that there is an urgent need to evaluate the implications of climate change in civil and environmental engineering practice, and that there are great opportunities for applying data-driven approaches for incorporating climate science in the practice of engineering.
Historical Climate Change
Location-specific, long-term historical climate change was studied for over 100 U.S. cities. Figure presents the time series of historical annual average temperature anomalies for the studied U.S. cities.
Forecasting Future
A statistical, time-series model – the ARIMA (autoregressive integrated moving average) model – was used to forecast near-term (up to 20 years) future city-specific temperature and precipitation. Figure presents temperature forecasts for Phoenix, AZ.
Using Climate Model Projections
Climate model projections of future climate conditions are an important source of future information for practical applications. Detailed procedures for engineering use of climate model projections were develoepd. Figure presents a part of steps in using climate model projection results.
Forecasts and projections of future climate conditions were used to evaluate the implications of climate change impacts on different engineering sectors, e.g., water quality, as the
Engineering Applications
